A wealth of digital assets—video and music files, photographic images, presentations, documents, spreadsheets, message threads and RSS feeds, as examples—reside on digital storage media in many different formats. In recent years, digital assets have become increasingly distributable because of the development of world-wide, public networks, especially the Internet. Also in recent years, portable, handheld devices such as cellular phones, electronic games, and personal music players have become increasingly powerful and inexpensive. Handheld-device users can, to varying degrees, retrieve digital assets from public networks and use, review, or enjoy such assets.
Making digital assets more easily convertible from one format to another and from one device to another may further increase access to useful and enjoyable digital content. In addition, facile interconversion of information-packed digital assets may support group learning in progressive pedagogies and unconventional settings.